Carlo Allegri

Carlo Allegri

Based
New York & Miami, United States
Born
Paget, Bermuda
Status
Photographer
“I love to shoot portraits. Figuring out how to make the most of your five minutes with a subject to make a nicely lit photo is a lot of fun.”

Beat

I cover breaking news and entertainment stories, and I shoot portraiture.

One Shot

. Sandy Hook, United States. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
Sandy Hook elementary school student Mamnun Ahmed, 6, looks at videos on his camera as he sits by the front window of his house, weeks after a gunman broke into Sandy Hook, shooting 20 students and 6 adults dead.
“This was a few weeks after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre and, with reporter Edith Honan, I got to speak to the family of a boy who had been there in school that day. He had been drawing bloody, graphic pictures depicting what he saw and his spirit and his story were both very moving.”

Profile

My grandmother gave me a rangefinder camera when I was 8 years old and she told me to shoot all the photos I wanted. It was all black and white and I fell in love with the process of photography. I was in Italy at the time, so of course everything I pointed the lens at was amazing.

I mostly learnt photography by watching others around me and seeing how they crafted their images. Reuters legends Andy Clark and Gary Hershorn were big inspirations to me and I followed them and what they were doing closely.

I went to Loyalist College in Canada for photography, but failed the first year and was kicked out of the program because I was spending too much time freelancing at the Toronto Sun newspaper in Toronto.

I got my first assignment when there was a body building competition at my High School one weekend. I took a portrait of the winner with his trophy and brought the roll of film to a newspaper to see if they would be interested in using the photo. They bought it for $15.00 and I was hooked - not for the money, but because I got to see my name in print for the first time on a photo credit.

I covered the crash of Swiss Air 111, which came down in Canada in 1998. During the memorial service there was a 21-gun salute, and the sound of the guns going off and all the families crying will always be with me.

I love to shoot portraits. Figuring out how to make the most of your five minutes with a subject to make a nicely lit photo is a lot of fun. Breaking news assignments excite me too: they always gets the blood flowing into all the right creative areas of the brain.

My biggest lesson used to be always make sure you have film in the camera. Now it's always make sure you have a disk in the camera!